In a collection that subverts sentiment even as it delves into the rich inner life of human sentimentality, Stonestreet stretches language and the reader’s expectations across the page. White space is a mind at work, parenthesis are interrogations, and prosody is the song of new life. This chapbook is must-read for anyone marching toward an

Part dictionary, part guide to living, and part historical record of content, From the Dictionary of Living Things turns its own pages. It is a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking first collection from a poet at the beginnings of her career.

Language Arts (Wave Books 2014) by Cedar Sigo is a departure and then reintroduction to form on avant garde’s terms. In addition to disparate explosions of imagery, Cedar trains the ear for surprise of sound and a prosody that was born of childhood prayer, exposure to native tongue, and an understanding of musical composition. You

Kevin Prufer is a rare poet who manages to layer narratives and weave metrical variations seamlessly into his work, all while placing it on the page in an organic and “effortless” way. This is especially notable when we come to understand the process by which his poems are born; the disparate connections and glorious jumps,

To read Venus Thrashs The Fateful Apple (Urban Poets and Lyricists, 2014) is to venture into two assertions of self-hood. The first is a raucous, boundary-setting with the world and the second is reverent consciousness of ancestry and quietude. Thrash plays out her own duality of self and history and takes the reader on a

David Biespiels Charming Gardeners (University of Washington Press, 2013) is unlike any book Ive read in a long time. Filled with epistolary poems, his book despite being populated by the poets friends and family is actually a work of great loneliness. In many ways, Biespiels journey is Americas, where the road is both a symbol

Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin Books, 2012), has gotten a lot of attention for his book of poems because of his relentless mashing together of pop-cultural references with literary and scholarly ones. Also, his ubiquitous use of rhyming was strangely considered noteworthy by poetry readers. Why has a mode of expression that

Dana Gioias deference to poetic tradition and artistic beauty is intolerable to those who taste the venom of ideology in every linguistic expression of experience. But what ideology is present in the poets response to having lost a child? More broadly, what ideology is at play when our bodies find pleasure in the music of

In Little Stranger (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), Lisa Olstein’s poems are concerned with the tension between the public and the personal and how the former bullies its way into the latter. Olstein’s book is both provoked into existence and inspired by our contemporary moment. Its urgency makes sense when one sees Little Stranger as a